UNITED ARAB EMIRATES. Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) captain Virat Kohli was fined Rs 1.2 million (approximately $ 16,000) on Thursday for slow over-rate. The match was played between Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) and Kings XI Punjab (KXI Punjab) at Abu Dhabi International stadium. The fine was the result of slow over-rate by the RCB bowlers and it was under IPL code-of-conduct relating to minimum over-rate offence.
Virat’s poor show against KXI Punjab
Virat Kohli didn’t have a great game against KXI Punjab on Thursday. He dropped KXI Punjab captain K.L. Rahul, twice which costed RCB very dearly. Meanwhile, K.L. Rahul scored record-smashing century 132(69b, 14×4, 7×6) which took the game away from RCB. He dropped K.L. Rahul twice when he was on 83 and 89 runs. KXI Punjab managed to score a mammoth total of 206.
When Kohli came to bat, RCB had already lost two early wickets on the score of 4. His stay on the wicket was very short. He was caught at mid-on when he tried to pull the short-pitched ball from Cottrell. Kohli scored only 1 run of 5 balls. He was a failure in his first match too. For a player of his calibre, failures in two successive matches is a rare event. Eventually, RCB lost the match by a margin of 97 runs.
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At the post-match presentation, he said, “I have to stand in front and take the brunt of it, not the best day in the office, couple of important chances of KL when he was set and that cost us 35-40 runs at a later stage. Maybe if we restricted them to 180 we wouldn’t have been under pressure from ball one of the chase.
He further added , “We know exactly where we went wrong and I have to put my hand up and say should’ve led from the front and taken those two chances.”
